Macroblog

About Me

Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

February 23, 2009

The Crowdsourcing Book: A Correction

It's been brought to my attention that I made an unfortunate error in the book. In the final chapter I briefly examine a Canadian crowdsourcing firm called Cambrian House, which had intended to use online communities to: A) Generate ideas for new products; B) Determine which of those ideas had merit; and C) Build said products and bring them to market. The crowd turned out to excel at parts A and B, but the company had a difficult time persuading their members to invest the considerable sweat equity involved in launching a new business. And therein lay a lesson about crowdsourcing.

However, I summed up their experience by pondering whether "the failure of Cambrian House signifies the failure of crowdsourcing." (My unequivocal answer, of course, is no it doesn't.) The fact is, Cambrian House didn't fail, even if their original business model did, which is what I meant to imply. The company has shifted to focusing on licensing its software as a sort of crowdsourcing operating system. This shift was underway when I was reporting on the company, but I left that nuance on the cutting room floor. The fact is, I was and remain a big fan of the people behind the company, which embodied some of the best aspects of crowdsourcing, from community respect to total transparency.

I also noted that the company had "sold its assets to the VC-firm Spencer Trask." At the time of writing, such a deal was under discussion. In the end, Spencer Trask only licensed CH's software. Again, my apologies to the good folks at Cambrian House for the error.

Comments

Thanks for the correction. In hindsight when you look at the point of failure for Cambrian House juxtaposed with the threshold of participation illustrated in Ross Mayfield's Power Law of Participation http://tinyurl.com/Ross-Mayfield it makes complete sense how crowdsourcing fell apart in that example. At some point to continue to attract the masses to contribute at higher levels there most be some sort of return beyond, efficacy, reciprocity, and recognition.

The interesting this is once the idea had reached point "C", then maybe that is the crossroad where you take the idea to the more traditional start-up routes and do the hard core leg work to find angle funding. The way Cambrian House had it set up is almost like telling the Threadless.com customers who have voted on a specific design to now go and make the shirts.

I think that this points out that not all processes in building companies can be crowdsourced which is not say that crowdsourcing is not viable, it is. It just means that you have to understand how to use it like any other tool.

The BW piece suffers from the common pitfalls of analysis of national–leaning perspective. Here’s a quote from the article:

What happened to the "everything is local" adage? The concept of local is morphing quickly in a world where instant global communications and social media widen our circle of friends and acquaintances to include the world. In essence, we've become national—if not international—citizens.